mdn2000
Rookie
- Banned
- #461
Noam Chomsky:
"Little of novelty or substance can be added to the millions of words that have already been written or spoken about Noam Chomsky. But it’s worth repeating a couple of them, if only to underscore the sheer, breathtaking scale of his achievements.
"First, he is the eighth most-cited author in the world, ever.
"Sharing the top ten with him are: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Hegel and Cicero.
"Put simply, to ignore his work is to court ignorance and irrelevance.
"Second, he is, without a doubt, our Bertrand Russell: a man of extraordinary intellectual achievement, the father of modern linguistics, a pioneer of cognitive science, a political thinker of astonishing breadth and erudition, a writer of great moral courage in the face of cruelty and oppression, a tireless campaigner for peace and justice, and a robust voice of reason in the wilderness of despair and cynicism that is our modern world."
ZCommunications
An interview with Chomsky is your source. That is pretty stupid, not because of who Chomsky is, but because its simply an opinion, in an interview, not even a history scholar.
That is your idea of offering a bit of information to have a discussion about history.
City Journal
Here’s a small but representative sample. The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”
the U.S. instigated a process that “annihilated the indigenous [American] population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.”
For Chomsky, turn over any monster anywhere and look at the underside. Each is clearly marked: MADE IN AMERICA. The cold war? All America’s fault: “The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” Castro’s executions and prisons filled with dissenters? Irrelevant, for “Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism [from the U.S., of course] than any other country.” The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as “tales of Communist atrocities” based on “unreliable” accounts. At most, the executions “numbered in the thousands” and were “aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing.” In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence.
Chomsky concedes that the WTC attack was unfortunate—not so much because of the deaths of Americans, but because “the atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow to the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized.” (Some other group, disguised as Palestinians, must have been dancing in the streets that day.) Israel, he adds, “is openly exulting in the ‘window of opportunity’ it now has to crush Palestinians with impunity.”
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